LONDON: London’s Heathrow Airport resumed full operations on Saturday, a day after a fire knocked out its power supply and shut Europe’s busiest airport, causing global travel chaos.
Some flights were canceled or delayed as the travel industry scrambled to reroute passengers and fix battered airline schedules after the huge fire at an electrical substation serving the airport.
Resumed flights had begun on Friday evening, but the shuttering of the world’s fifth-busiest airport for most of the day left tens of thousands searching for scarce hotel rooms and replacement seats while airlines tried to return jets and crew to bases.
Operations were normal on Saturday morning, but airlines were still dealing with the aftermath, said the airport’s chief executive, Thomas Woldbye.
“We don’t expect any major amount of flights to be canceled or delayed. There are some cancelations and there are some delays. We are handling them in the same way as we would normally do,” Woldbye told BBC radio.
The vast majority of scheduled morning flights departed successfully on Saturday morning, with a handful of delays and cancelations, Heathrow’s departures website showed.
British Airways, whose main hub is Heathrow, said it expected around 85 percent of its schedule of almost 600 departures and arrivals to proceed on Saturday.
“We are planning to operate as many flights as possible to and from Heathrow on Saturday, but to recover an operation of our size after such a significant incident is extremely complex,” the airline said in a statement.
“It is likely that all traveling customers will experience delays as we continue to navigate the challenges posed by Friday’s power outage at the airport.”
A Heathrow spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the airport had “hundreds of additional colleagues on hand in our terminals and we have added flights to today’s schedule to facilitate an extra 10,000 passengers traveling through the airport.”
The travel industry, facing the prospect of a financial hit costing tens of millions of pounds and a likely fight over who should pay, questioned how such crucial infrastructure could fail without backup.
“It is a clear planning failure by the airport,” said Willie Walsh, head of global airlines body IATA, who, as former head of British Airways, has for years been a fierce critic of the crowded hub.
Police said that after an initial assessment they were not treating the incident as suspicious, although enquiries remained ongoing. London Fire Brigade said its investigations would focus on the electrical distribution equipment.
The airport had been due to handle 1,351 flights on Friday, flying up to 291,000 passengers, but planes were diverted to other airports in Britain and across Europe, while many long-haul flights returned to their point of departure.
Woldbye, asked on Friday who would pay for the disruption, said there were “procedures in place,” adding “we don’t have liabilities in place for incidents like this.”
Restrictions on overnight flights were temporarily lifted by Britain’s Department of Transport to ease congestion, but British Airways Chief Executive Sean Doyle said the closure was set to have a “huge impact on all of our customers flying with us over the coming days.”
Virgin Atlantic said it expected to operate “a near full schedule” with limited cancelations on Saturday but that the situation remained dynamic and all flights would be kept under continuous review.
Airlines including JetBlue, American Airlines, Air Canada, Air India, Delta Air Lines, Qantas, United Airlines, British Airways and Virgin were diverted or returned to their origin airports in the wake of the closure, according to data from flight analytics firm Cirium.
Shares in many airlines fell on Friday.
Aviation experts said the last time European airports experienced disruption on such a large scale was the 2010 Icelandic volcanic ash cloud that grounded some 100,000 flights.
They warned that some passengers forced to land in Europe may have to stay in transit lounges if they lack the paperwork to leave the airport.
Prices at hotels around Heathrow jumped, with booking sites offering rooms for 500 pounds ($645), roughly five times the normal price levels.
Police said after an initial assessment, they were not treating the incident at the power substation as suspicious, although enquiries remained ongoing. London Fire Brigade said its investigations would focus on the electrical distribution equipment.
Heathrow and London’s other major airports have been hit by other outages in recent years, most recently by an automated gate failure and an air traffic system meltdown, both in 2023.

MANILA: Four foreign hikers who had been missing for days in a mountainous area of the central Philippines were rescued Saturday, local authorities said, a day after their two companions were found safe.
The six-man group, which included German, British, Russian and Canadian nationals, had set out on Wednesday for what was to be a four-hour excursion in an area of Negros Oriental province officials said was hit by a downpour.
“The army rescuers found them in the vicinity of the Silab hydropower plant,” said Jose Lawrence Silorio, a rescue official in the municipality of Amlan, near the province’s Balinsasayao Twin Lakes Natural Park.
Police identified the men as Germans Aldwin Fink, 60, and Wolfgang Schlenker, 67; Russian Anton Chernov, 38; and 50-year-old Canadian Terry De Gunten.
Philippine Army personnel found the hikers in a mountainous area thick with vegetation, said investigator Leo Gil Villafranca.
“They told the army they got lost due to the fog,” he said, adding all the hikers were residents of the province.
The four were discovered at 9:44 am (0144 GMT), according to local authorities.
“Overall, they are OK, but they had minor abrasions. We wrapped one of them in a blanket because he was feeling cold. But he was eventually able to stand up on his own,” Silorio said.
“They told us they survived by eating edible plants in the forest,” he added.
Silorio said the group was found about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from where fellow hikers Torsten Martin Groschupp, 58, and Alexander Radvanyi, 63, were discovered Friday morning.
An image posted to a police Facebook page showed De Gunten, his legs bloodied, talking to rescuers inside an ambulance while Chernov lay on a stretcher wrapped in a blanket.
Police said Friday that the weather had likely played a role in the group’s becoming lost on what they said was a “difficult” trail in a mountainous area the men were tackling without a guide.
“It was rainy at the time and that led to zero visibility,” said Valencia police officer Henry Japay, adding there was no cell phone reception in the area.
“There’s a big possibility that they stopped and took shelter when it started raining.”